What Really Happened Inside 121 Greycourt Road?

“Rob swore up and down that they weren’t,” says Long, who called Rob with an ultimatum: You tell Sophie, or I do. He did, and promised it was nothing. Sophie, then six months pregnant with their second child, had other things on her mind. But three months later, it happened again. This time, Sophie’s friend Joanne Maldonado saw Rob and the ex coming out of a Dunkin’ Donuts, again holding hands. And this time, three-year-old Joey was with them. But when Joanne called Sophie that night, she didn’t get a chance to rat Rob out.

“I’m in labor,” Sophie said.

The next day, March 30, 1999, Maldonado and Long went to the hospital to meet new baby Anthony. “Sooo,” Maldonado said while they stood around the hospital room with the new parents. “Did Rob tell you I saw him yesterday at Dunkin’ Donuts?”

“Yeah,” Sophie said, matter-of-factly. “He ran into Robbie’s mom.”

“Yeah, right,” Maldonado snapped back.

Three weeks later, Rob moved out.

It wasn’t the first time Rob and Sophie had dealt with infidelity. Weeks before their wedding, some people said, Sophie had a fling of her own. Rob forgave her. But the stakes were higher now. Sophie had a three-year-old and an infant to care for, alone, on a single income, in a house she wasn’t sure she could still afford. Rob was working a second job to make the support payments. And then he really messed up.

It was a bad scene — Rob being led out of his apartment in handcuffs. He’d allegedly beaten up his ex, whom he’d been dating since leaving Sophie seven months before. Worse, Joey, Anthony, and Rob’s older son Robbie had all been there when it happened. Everyone who knew Rob was shocked.

“I’ve known him my entire life,” says Matt Ferabelli, Rob’s buddy since second grade at St. Helena’s in Olney. “With the exception of teenage malehood, full of piss and vinegar and fighting in the woods, I have never known him to have even a remotely violent streak in his body.”

But there was a lot that people didn’t know about Rob. He’d been arrested the year before after a different incident with his ex, and though charges were later dropped, a temporary restraining order was issued against him on her behalf. Even after they divorced, Rob and Sophie commiserated about the conflicts they both had with Rob’s ex — at least twice, Sophie called the cops claiming that she’d shown up at the house and refused to leave. The ex was never arrested or charged with a crime.